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Brave New World

Aldous Huxley

Table of Contents

Plot Overview

Aldous Huxley was born in
Surrey, England, on July 26, 1894, to an illustrious
family deeply rooted in England’s literary and scientific tradition.
Huxley’s father, Leonard Huxley, was the son of Thomas Henry Huxley,
a well-known biologist who gained the nickname “Darwin’s bulldog”
for championing Charles Darwin’s evolutionary ideas. His mother,
Julia Arnold, was related to the important nineteenth-century poet
and essayist Matthew Arnold.

Raised in this family of scientists, writers, and teachers
(his father was a writer and teacher, and his mother a schoolmistress),
Huxley received an excellent education, first at home, then at Eton,
providing him with access to numerous fields of knowledge. Huxley
was an avid student, and during his lifetime he was renowned as
a generalist, an intellectual who had mastered the use of the English
language but was also informed about cutting-edge developments in science
and other fields. Although much of his scientific understanding
was superficial—he was easily convinced of findings that remained
somewhat on the fringe of mainstream science—his education at the
intersection of science and literature allowed him to integrate
current scientific findings into his novels and essays in a way
that few other writers of his time were able to do.

Aside from his education, another major influence on Huxley’s life
and writing was an eye disease contracted in his teenage years that
left him almost blind. As a teenager Huxley had dreamed about becoming
a doctor, but the degeneration of his eyesight prevented him from
pursuing his chosen career. It also severely restricted the activities
he could pursue. Because of his near blindness, he depended heavily
on his first wife, Maria, to take care of him. Blindness and vision
are motifs that permeate much of Huxley’s writing.

After graduating from Oxford in 1916, Huxley
began to make a name for himself writing satirical pieces about
the British upper class. Though these writings were skillful and
gained Huxley an audience and literary name, they were generally
considered to offer little depth beyond their lightweight criticisms
of social manners. Huxley continued to write prolifically, working
as an essayist and journalist, and publishing four volumes of poetry
before beginning to work on novels. Without giving up his other
writing, beginning in 1921, Huxley produced
a series of novels at an astonishing rate: Crome Yellow was
published in 1921, followed by Antic
Hay in 1923, Those Barren
Leaves in 1925, and Point
Counter Point in 1928. During these
years, Huxley left his early satires behind and became more interested
in writing about subjects with deeper philosophical and ethical
significance. Much of his work deals with the conflict between the
interests of the individual and society, often focusing on the problem
of self-realization within the context of social responsibility.
These themes reached their zenith in Huxley’s Brave New
World, published in 1932. His most
enduring work imagined a fictional future in which free will and
individuality have been sacrificed in deference to complete social
stability.

Brave New World marked a step in a new
direction for Huxley, combining his skill for satire with his fascination
with science to create a dystopian (anti-utopian) world in which
a totalitarian government controlled society by the use of science
and technology. Through its exploration of the pitfalls of linking
science, technology, and politics, and its argument that such a
link will likely reduce human individuality, Brave New World deals
with similar themes as George Orwell’s famous novel 1984. Orwell
wrote his novel in 1949, after the dangers
of totalitarian governments had been played out to tragic effect
in World War II, and during the great struggle of the Cold War and
the arms race which so powerfully underlined the role of technology
in the modern world. Huxley anticipated all of these developments.
Hitler came to power in Germany a year after the publication of Brave
New World. World War II broke out six years after. The
atomic bomb was dropped thirteen years after its publication, initiating
the Cold War and what President Eisenhower referred to as a frightening
buildup of the “military-industrial complex.” Huxley’s novel seems,
in many ways, to prophesize the major themes and struggles that
dominated life and debate in the second half of the twentieth century,
and continue to dominate it in the twenty-first.

After publishing Brave New World, Huxley
continued to live in England, making frequent journeys to Italy.
In 1937 Huxley moved to California. An ardent
pacifist, he had become alarmed at the growing military buildup
in Europe, and determined to remove himself from the possibility
of war. Already famous as a writer of novels and essays,
he tried to make a living as a screenwriter. He had little success.
Huxley never seemed to grasp the requirements of the form, and his
erudite literary style did not translate well to the screen.

In the late forties, Huxley started to experiment with
hallucinogenic drugs such as LSD and mescaline. He also maintained
an interest in occult phenomena, such as hypnotism, séances, and
other activities occupying the border between science and mysticism. Huxley’s
experiments with drugs led him to write several books that had profound
influences on the sixties counterculture. The book he wrote about
his experiences with mescaline, The Doors of Perception, influenced
a young man named Jim Morrison and his friends, and they named the
band they formed The Doors. (The phrase, “the doors of perception”
comes from a William Blake poem called The Marriage of Heaven
and Hell.) In his last major work, Island, published
in 1962, Huxley describes a doomed
utopia called Pala that serves as a contrast to his earlier vision
of dystopia. A central aspect of Pala’s ideal culture is the use
of a hallucinogenic drug called “moksha,” which provides an interesting
context in which to view soma, the drug in Brave
New World that serves as one tool of the totalitarian state. Huxley
died on November 22, 1963, in Los Angeles.

Utopias and Dystopias

Brave New World belongs to the genre
of utopian literature. A utopia is an imaginary society organized
to create ideal conditions for human beings, eliminating hatred,
pain, neglect, and all of the other evils of the world.

The word utopia comes from Sir Thomas More’s novel Utopia (1516),
and it is derived from Greek roots that could be translated to mean
either “good place” or “no place.” Books that include descriptions
of utopian societies were written long before More’s novel, however.
Plato’s Republic is a prime example. Sometimes
the societies described are meant to represent the perfect society,
but sometimes utopias are created to satirize existing societies,
or simply to speculate about what life might be like under different
conditions. In the 1920s, just before Brave
New World was written, a number of bitterly satirical novels
were written to describe the horrors of a planned or totalitarian
society. The societies they describe are called dystopias, places
where things are badly awry. Either term, utopia or dystopia, could
correctly be used to describe Brave New World.

Replacing the concept of a belief-based, non-verifiable being with Ford, a man who existed, eliminates all the wonder and mystery related to traditional religions.
Also eliminating all other belief systems with a single, inarguable "godhead" rids the World State citizens of anxiety and conflicts based on religious beliefs and orthodoxies.